Abstract
AbstractIt has been argued that lifecourse transitions are transformative moments for individuals when lifestyles, habits and behaviours are potentially open to contemplation and change. Within sustainability research such ‘moments of change’ are regarded as offering potential to encourage less environmentally damaging consumption patterns. Research on consumption indicates that orientations to material goods and their affective significance are complex. Whilst sociological work understands attachment to things as integral to maintaining kinship relations, this is hard to reconcile with long-standing moral concerns about materialism and psychological research which indicates a negative relationship between the acquisition of material objects and wellbeing, and the environmental implications of acquiring and divesting ‘stuff’. Yet there has been little engagement with how older people orient to their material possessions and divestment, the implications of this for later-life wellbeing and for environmental sustainability. In this paper, we draw these different strands of work together to understand how retirees relate to their material possessions and their divestment. Drawing on serial interviews with individuals in the United Kingdom, we explore how the transition to retirement highlights the complexity of participants’ attachment to things. While some items had profound relational significance, others were experienced as troublesome. Decisions on what to divest were shaped by pragmatic considerations and levels of attachment, whilst modes of divestment were aligned with values of thrift.
Highlights
The transition to retirement is a well-researched topic within gerontology where it has been explored as a potential point at which to encourage later-life wellbeing through advice on maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle (Heaven et al, 2015)
The transition to retirement as a potential window of opportunity to encourage more sustainable patterns of consumption has only received scant attention, and older people in general are often absent from environmental sustainability discussions
We have drawn on the different fields of gerontology, consumption and environmental sustainability, and in so doing have sought to move critical work on the consumption and divestment practices of the current generation of retirees into the arenas of sustainable lifestyles and consumption
Summary
The transition to retirement is a well-researched topic within gerontology where it has been explored as a potential point at which to encourage later-life wellbeing through advice on maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle (Heaven et al, 2015), Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The transition to retirement as a potential window of opportunity to encourage more sustainable patterns of consumption has only received scant attention, and older people in general are often absent from environmental sustainability discussions (for exceptions, on later-life travel practices see Fox et al, 2017; Hitchings et al, 2018; and on consumption, see Venn et al, 2017; Burningham and Venn, 2020) This is problematic given current projections that the proportion of older people in the United Kingdom (UK) is set to rise dramatically over the 25 years (Coates et al, 2019). Retirement is likely to continue to be fluid and changeable as a result of the abolition of a fixed retirement age in the UK and the state pension age rising over the coming years (Thompson et al, 2011)
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